UTC Website Projects

and CMS migration

The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

We know that our priorities may not be your priorities. We try to communicate realistic expectations of time commitments and necessary interactions during intake meetings to keep the project rolling.

But sometimes, frequently enough, I have to step in and provide additional follow-up. My goal is to get the work done and keep the project moving forward. The fine art comes in when we have to ‘negotiate’ dates. I find that most of the time there’s just a need for a reset on expectations.

Maybe you have members of your office who have all been out and have not had time to devote to reviewing webpages. Maybe you just need an extra day or two and you promise to get it done.

Don’t be surprised to hear from me during a review period just to make sure we’re still on track or if we are headed for a derailment! Following up can take on many forms. It can be a simple email, a phone call or passing in a hallway. As artfully and skillfully as I can, I’ll ask how things are going. Sometimes we’ll need to agree on delay dates. As earnestly as I can, I will try to reset dates to accommodate you and your office team. Know this though…for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What benefits one timeline, may hinder another.

So when I ask for an update on progress, it’s not to maintain the schedule at all costs, but it’s to accommodate the greatest number of people on all sides of the project while still trying to reach the ultimate goal—a refreshed website.

Be Our Guest

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If you’ve been to anything Disney, you know there’s an entire culture around visitors being treated as guests.  If you’ve shopped at Nordstrom’s or Williams-Sonoma, both hallmarks of customer service, the focus on understanding customers and making spaces inviting is paramount to what they do.  You don’t just buy a product, you have an overall experience.

With that thought in mind, the Web team is implementing a more robust way to collect your issues and requests.

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A Letter from Camp

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UTC was a Bronze sponsor of Drupal Camp Chattanooga held on June 7-8 at Chattanooga State Community College.  Chèrie Whipple, Chris Gilligan and Mike Flores attended to represent UTC.

This is my third Drupal specific camp having attended Baltimore’s Drupal Camp and Washington D.C.’s DrupalGovCon. The Chattanooga Drupal Users Group (CHADUG), headed up by Lee Walker of Code Journeyman, meets monthly. Meeting other Drupal users and hearing their stories, particularly how Drupal changed their career lives, has been eye opening and encouraging. [Read more…]

Tell Me a Story, Paint Me a Picture

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Why do you search the internet?

Maybe you’re looking for information, knowledge, news of the day. Maybe you have a goal in mind and need to find a specific answer to a question. For those who visit our UTC website, it could be to find out admissions requirements, program information in a specific college or where to pay a parking fine.

When we begin to consider who visits our website and why, the volume of people and reasons can become daunting. Between Jan. 1, 2018, and today, we’ve had 3,767,325 visits to the UTC.edu website homepage alone according to our Siteimprove analytics. That’s right—almost 4 million visits. And what brings them?

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April Showers Bring May Milestones

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Our April showers came in the way of website refresh “go-lives” with eight departments giving the green light to push their sites to production. April was, by far, our busiest month between intake meetings, site reviews and final edits.

As of the last day of April, we have managed to refresh/review 58 departmental or group sites (some with multiple subsites).

We’ve also passed the halfway point in terms of refreshed content and are sitting at 60 percent completed on the website refresh meter. How does that translate in page numbers, you ask? It puts us past the 2,500-page mark! [Read more…]

Spring Cleaning Sparks Joy

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I dedicate this post to Donny Behneman as my latest mantra has become “Does this webpage spark joy?” Or a variation, “Does this PDF spark joy?” Or “Does this photo spark joy?”

As we work our way through the UTC website, one topic in each intake meeting has to do with a review of pages that can potentially be deleted. Old, outdated content contributes, in large part, to the refresh effort. Schedules from 2014, a PDF form from 2011, a photo of a student who has long since graduated all come to light during the refresh process.

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Let’s Go To Camp

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Remember the summer days when time was spent in the great outdoors chasing friends through the woods and discovering new worlds? Or perhaps, summer camp might have been classes at a museum filled with art or at the zoo tending to the elephants. Camps and campers typically equate to fun, summertime activity.

June 7 and 8 will provide an opportunity to attend another type of camp…”Drupal Camp.” Rather than spending time in the great outdoors, the local Drupal community will set up camp at Chattanooga State to share in the adventures of using, programming and learning about all things Drupal.

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Why Drupal? Why Not?

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I’ve been working on web projects for nearly a decade. I enjoy crafting solutions and, thankfully, my work over the years has steered me towards providing technological answers. What I’ve learned is that Drupal is the defacto content management system/framework for many public sector organizations and entities.

This makes sense because groups in the public sector often have very unique organizational qualities, which requires a product suite that can complement those complexities. Drupal is both pliable and opinionated; you may build what you need but you have to do it the Drupal way. The following are snippets of research I’ve done regarding Drupal and why it’s a great solution for UTC. [Read more…]

Time Marches On

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How do we predict how long it will take to <fill in the blank>? When it comes to initiatives or activities that have been done before, experience plays a pivotal role in determining outcome. On the other hand, luck may play just as much of a role in the end.

I’ve managed dozens and dozens of projects over the years. Based on my years of experience, I should be able to more or less accurately predict a project’s timeline. I also know that every project is different and, while I’m pretty good at identifying risk factors at the start of the project, there will always be something that comes up that no one thought of before. A bit like Murphy’s Law, but we’ll call it Whipple’s Hypothesis for now.

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